Bookworm RoomConservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.2018-02-22T02:20:59Zhttp://www.bookwormroom.com/feed/atom/WordPressBookwormhttp://bookwormroom.comhttp://www.bookwormroom.com/?p=550462018-02-22T02:20:59Z2018-02-22T02:20:58ZIs David Hogg, the post-Florida shooting media darling, the real deal or a Leftist plant? The New York Times provides no facts to help answer that question. It was inevitable that, after the school shooting in Florida, Progressives would demand that Americans surrender their Second Amendment rights. Their campaign this time has a new twist. […]

]]>Is David Hogg, the post-Florida shooting media darling, the real deal or a Leftist plant? The New York Times provides no facts to help answer that question.

It was inevitable that, after the school shooting in Florida, Progressives would demand that Americans surrender their Second Amendment rights. Their campaign this time has a new twist. Rather than merely using frightened and grieving parents, Progressives in the media decided to turn the political attack into something John Hinderaker has aptly called a “children’s crusade.” This children’s crusade has included endless visuals of hysterical teenagers at the Florida Statehouse — which, to its credit, resisted the hysteria and refused to enter into gun grabbing mode. The students have also been engaging in interviews with drive-by media outlets and, with help from the hard-Left, antisemitic, anti-white Women’s March crew, organizing mass marches and school walkouts.

The Progressives, both the professionals in media and politics, and the useful idiots who routinely hew Left in social media, have bestowed upon these students the same “absolute moral authority” they granted grieving Mom and anti-war fanatic Cindy Sheehan — that is, they gave her that authority right until Obama was in the White House, at which time she ceased to be useful to them. They seem blind to the irony that they are imputing wisdom to the same people they claim are so helpless they must remain on their parents’ healthcare until they are 26. They are telling us we have to let the same people who eat Tide Pods dictate America’s constitutional policy. Of course, these are also the same people who insist that girls as young as 12 get the Pill and abortions without parental consent, but that tanning and ear-piercing must have a parent’s signature. We don’t look for logic with the Left.

Given the way the Left weaponized teenagers after the Florida shooting, it’s scarcely surprising to see that pro-Second Amendment Americans are striking back by taking a long, hard look at these same teenagers. The conservative side of my Facebook feed is a phenomenal resource for this push-back. One of the major forms of push-back bubbling up questions the bona fides of these students, especially the most prominent among them, a kid named David Hogg.

Please note that I do not vouch for the veracity of any of the material below. It could be true. It could be Photoshopped and I’d have no way of knowing. It could be pure tin foil conspiracy stuff. It could have a grain of truth wrapped in gauzy fantasy. I have no idea. I just want you to see what’s out there so that you will understand how dismally incompetent the New York Times was when it decided to challenge the theories set out below.

The kid who has been running his mouth about how Donald Trump and the GOP are teaming to help murder high school kids by upholding the Second Amendment is the son of an FBI agent.

David Hogg is a school shooting survivor in Florida. At least that is what the mainstream media has told us. We wouldn’t be surprised by anything involving the FBI at this point.

From Deep State CBS News:

“David Hogg was in school when the Parkland, Florida, shooting started. His father is a retired FBI agent, so he recognized immediately that this was a gun. Here’s what he did:”

And while the media allowed Hogg to adorn us with his worldly teen views on the Constitution, they conveniently left out the part where the FBI was warned that the Florida school shooter had promised to shoot up a school — at least twice — long before the massacre that killed 17 students last week.

If Hogg knew the shooter would snap — as he and other students have professed — perhaps he could have told his father about it.

First, we learn the mainstream media’s school shooting darling is the son of an FBI agent (retired). Then he goes on television ranting against President Trump when the deadly Florida school shooting last week — it turns out — was more the fault of the FBI than anyone even close to the White House.

Hogg ranted live on CNN and CBS and all other networks as his anti-Trump and anti-GOP gun control comments went viral in the mainstream media vacuum.

Liberal Nation applauded.

But now we learn Hogg was hanging out at CNN headquarters in Atlanta, GA sometime Before the school shooting. Before the shooting. Posing behind an news anchor desk? Perhaps Hogg’s career dream is to sign on with the network — a young Jake Tapper — as he has portrayed himself since the deadly shooting that claimed 17 students as a “student journalist and entrepreneur.”

One student, in particular, David Hogg has been astonishingly articulate and highly skilled at propagating a new anti-Conservative/anti-Trump narrative behind the recent school shooting. Few have seen this type of rapid media play before, and when they have it has come from well-trained political operatives and MSM commentators.

Immediately, these students-turned-activists threw up some red flags.

In what was initially as an incredibly odd move for a high school student, Hogg vehemently defended the FBI and placed the blame squarely on the President’s shoulders…. before admitting that his father was in the FBI.

[snip]

Continuing, Hogg demonstrated his complete lack of American civics knowledge. A clueless Hogg appeared unaware of the fact that the President is not ‘in control’ of each department and branch of government, but must work and negotiate with them. Regardless, Hogg pushed the notion that Trump is in charge of the FBI.

[snip]

Adding to the “credibility” of Hogg, in a recently uncovered early cut from one of his interviews it appears he was heavily coached on lines and is merely reciting a script. Frequently seen in the footage mouthing the lines he should be reciting. Hogg becomes flustered multiple times, is seen apologizing, and asking for re-takes.

Considering that Hogg deliberately and repeatedly thrust himself into the media limelight, it seems . . . ah, what’s the word? Hypocritical? Cynical? Cowardly? Manipulative? Something like that. It seems something like that to hide a video to might show Hogg’s motives or innocence to be less than pure. You can see the same footage here, though:

Having seen it, you can decide for yourself whether he’s an actor flubbing lines or just a stressed teenager. But wait; there’s more! Lots more about floating through the blogosphere about David Hogg.

Thomas Lifson offers some logical, non-conspiratorial explanations for Hogg seemingly being everywhere that shots are fired or cameras are filming. But as I said, my point in this post is not to comment on the truth or falsity of claims that the Hogg kid is a plant or that there are such things as crisis actors.

(Actually, we know perfectly well that there are such things as “crisis actors” because they are routinely used in the Middle East. We’ve seen the infamous Mohammed al Dura hoax exposed. We’ve seen giggling, wiggling “corpses.” It’s Pallywood when the Palestinians do it and crisis theater when anyone else in that region performs for the cameras. It’s therefore entirely possible that’s what is happening here. I’m just ecumenical about what’s being alleged here because I have insufficient data.)

What I want to write about, instead, is about the utterly contemptible work that passes for journalism in the mainstream media. If I were a reporter tackling the claims about Hogg and other American-based “crisis actors,” I would come back with facts: Regarding Hogg, I would report about where he was born, where he lived before and where he lives now, how he’s interested in journalism, what role his father played in the FBI and the job he holds now. You know, I’d do actual investigation and reporting.

What’s so utterly fascinating with the New York Times’ report on conservative concerns about Hogg’s bona fides is that all it does is repeat conservative talking points and then sneer at how stupid they are. Here’s a paragraph by paragraph breakdown, consisting of a few quotations from the article and my summary of the meat of each paragraph:

Paragraph 1: The Times tells us how brave the students are who are speaking out.

Paragraph 2: Faced with this bravery, conservatives have resorted to calumnies against these students.

Paragraph 3: These calumnies are “baseless”:

In these baseless accounts, which by Tuesday had spread rapidly on social media, the students are described as “crisis actors,” who travel to the sites of shootings to instigate fury against guns. Or they are called F.B.I. plants, defending the bureau for its failure to catch the shooter. They have been portrayed as puppets being coached and manipulated by the Democratic Party, gun control activists, the so-called antifa movement and the left-wing billionaire George Soros.

At this point, what I expect in the subsequent paragraphs was for the New York Times, not only to quote the accusations conservatives are making, but also to prove to me why the charges are “baseless.” Except that’s not what the New York Times did. Instead, it just kept saying how awful the mean conservatives are.

Paragraph 5: Hogg is the student news director at his high school. This, incidentally, is the only factual statement the article makes about Hogg. Hogg is also a big hit with “liberals” (i.e., Leftists) because he’s “polished and compelling” on TV. No wonder, then, that “right-wing provocateurs like The Gateway Pundit, a fringe website” hate him. (Dear New York Times writers, the grammatically correct phrase is “such as the Gateway Pundit,” not “like the Gateway Pundit.” Can’t write. Can’t think.)

Paragraph 6: The Gateway Pundit argues that Hogg has been coached. Moreover, to the extent Hogg is talking about his FBI agent father, that FBI mention melds with “a broader right-wing trope, that liberal forces in the F.B.I. are trying to undermine President Trump and his pro-Second Amendment supporters.” Yeah, it’s funny how conservatives somehow got the idea about the FBI undermining Trump. Maybe it had something to do with reading Strzok’s and Page’s texts about undermining Trump. Or maybe it had to do with learning that the FBI relied upon a salacious piece of paid-for campaign dirt, produced by a Brit in reliance on Russians, to spy on people close to Trump.

Paragraph 7: The Gateway Pundit isn’t the worst. Alex Jones is say that the shooting was an anti-gun false flag. (Let me say that, while I’m ecumenical about Hogg, I do not at all support Alex Jones’ regular “false flag” theories. It seems to me that the shooter’s craziness, coupled with Broward County School District policies that kept him from being arrested and therefore buying guns, along with FBI failings, added to the cultural decline over which the Left has presided, are sufficient unto the day to explain what happened.)

Paragraph 8: Jack Kingston, a former U.S. Representative from Georgia, asked on CNN whether it was believable that “17-year-olds on their own are going to plan a nationwide rally?” Thankfully, the New York Times hastened to assure its frightened readers, “He was quickly rebuked by the anchor Alyson Camerota.” She sure showed him.

Paragraph 9: The conspiracy theory is going from the fringes to the mainstream, thanks to Bill O’Reilly who commented on the fact that the national press was happy to use kids to destroy the Trump administration. Seeing as how that’s precisely what the media has been doing, including with the very “news” story I’m fisking, it takes a heroic lack of self-awareness to castigate O’Reilly for pointing out something you’re actually in the midst of doing.

Paragraph 10: People spreading the conspiracy are “facing consequences.”

Paragraph 11: Benjamin Kelly, an aid to Florida State Rep Shawn Harrison, sent an email to the Tampa Bay Times saying that Hogg and Emma Gonzalez, his classmate, were actors.

Paragraph 14: Undeterred by Kelly’s firing, the Gateway Pundit has gone on to highlight the fact that the Women’s March (which has links to Soros) is pushing certain kids to the fore. Worse, people are sharing that theory.

You now have an accurate, if slightly snarky, summary of the New York Times response to the conspiracy. Do you see anything in there proving Hoggs’ bona fides? I don’t.

Given that the Times does not assert any facts to support its accusation that the conspiracy theory is “baseless,” why should I believe it any more than I should believe those questioning Hoggs’ appearance? What the Times did was not journalism; it was just a snarky opinion piece masquerading as journalism.

If that’s the best the nation’s once-premier news outlet can do, journalism in America isn’t only dead. The corpse is rotting in the streets.

As for me, I’ll continue to wait for data about David Hogg. Actor? Activist? Student? Prop? Victim? Manipulator? Charmer? Sociopath? Time and facts will tell — but I won’t find any of those facts in the Times.

]]>2Bookwormhttp://bookwormroom.comhttp://www.bookwormroom.com/?p=550402018-02-21T03:59:28Z2018-02-21T03:59:27ZFor people with gender dysphoria (transgenders), why do we brutally & dangerously force the body to match the mind, instead of gently matching mind to body? In Ohio, a judge decided to remove a 17-year-old girl from her parents custody and, instead, give custody to her grandparents. The parents were not beating their daughter or […]

]]>For people with gender dysphoria (transgenders), why do we brutally & dangerously force the body to match the mind, instead of gently matching mind to body?

In Ohio, a judge decided to remove a 17-year-old girl from her parents custody and, instead, give custody to her grandparents. The parents were not beating their daughter or starving her or depriving her of access to shelter or education. Instead, when their daughter announced that she was a boy, her parents rejected the idea of stuffing the child full of male hormones and continued to treat her as their daughter, not their son. (This included causing her emotional anguish by failing to acknowledge her male identity.) The local medical establishment, the grandparents, and the court decided that the parents were wrong. The girl is now being prepped for the latest in medical treatment for children with gender dysphoria.

There are a whole host of issues folded into the above paragraph that need to be unpacked in order to address my core question: Why has the medical establishment chosen the most violent, damaging treatment for such children rather than the least violent? And by “violent” I mean committing a serious assault on the human body.

Issue No. 1: Is there even such a thing as being “transgender”?

You’ll notice that I have avoided the term “transgender” and, instead, used the traditional medical term, which is “gender dysphoria.” As Ray Kremer nicely explained,

There are all types of body dysphorias, including the so-called “transabled” people who ruin perfectly functional body parts in order to become blind, an amputee, etc. Gender dysphoria is really no different than these, it’s just a variation on the theme of which body part is the scapegoat for making the person feel ill at ease in their own skin.

I would add to the list what is probably the most common gender dysphoria around: Anorexia. We’re all familiar with the young person, usually a teenage girl, who has a perfectly beautiful and healthy body, yet believes herself to be grotesquely fat. Her remedy is to starve herself to death. Significantly, we don’t call that girl transfat or transslender. We recognize that she has a mental illness that alienates her from the reality of her own body. We respond by treating her mind, to help her reconcile herself to her body’s reality.

When it comes to sexuality, though, this kind of common sense goes out the window. Suddenly, we have the whole medical and social establishment pretending that some people, despite entirely male or female bodies can, through the force of will and fantasy, magically become a sex opposite that of their body. Indeed, that’s how we ended up with the neologism “transgender” — it implicitly accepts the notion that mental discomfort, when taken seriously, magically changes genetic, biological reality. I refuse to use a term that pretends to science, but it really a disreputable amalgam of magical thinking and medical quackery.

Issue No. 2: While people with gender dysphoria are not magically the opposite sex just because they think they are, is there a possibility that their hormones and their genetic sex are misaligned?

There may well be an external hormonal cause for these mind-body disconnects.

Thanks to the current treatment the medical establishment is doing on people with body dysphoria, we have ample and repeated evidence that hormones affect not just the body (external sexual characteristics, such as breasts and gonads; musculature; the presence or absence of body hair; etc.), but that they also affect the mind. Men given estrogen become less aggressive and less interested in sex. Women given testosterone become more aggressive and more interested in sex.

Part of why men and women think and behave as they do is because of the gender specific hormones coursing through their bodies. Indeed, anyone who has witnessed their children going through puberty can see how strikingly different these sex specific hormonal effects are.

There’s reason to suspect that oral contraceptives may affect fetuses and gender. For example, there seems to be little doubt that a woman who takes the Pill while pregnant is more likely to have a child who is a hermaphrodite, which is true transgenderism:

Hermaphroditism is another condition that can affect the fetus, if you are on birth control during pregnancy. The condition affects especially the female fetuses that develop a set of reproductive male organs, besides their own ones, that are dominant. The main cause of this condition is given by the prolonged exposure of hydroxyprogesterone and norethidrone, two synthetic progestogens contained in high doses in most of the contraceptive pills.

Some people suspect that women who went off the Pill within a short time of conceiving may still have excess hydroxyprogesterone and norethidrone in their systems that is transferred to their child and even to that child’s child. These chemical hormone baths may damage the connection between the brain and the body’s genetic gender:

In the 1980s, I had a boss who had gotten a masters degree in psychology from New York University. He was a brilliant man; could have been a doctor. He told me a story that explains much of what we see in society today.

It seems that while doing his graduate work in the early 1960s, he had to do research on lab rats, which were given the synthetic hormones used in the then new birth control pills. The results, he told me, showed that the grandchildren of these lab rats would have high rates of homosexual behaviors. From what he told me, the findings were suppressed. Apparently, the powers that be wanted “the pill” to pass muster. What happened to the second generation of rats that followed was of no consequence to them.

Then my boss told me: The first generation of kids born to mothers using the pill have already arrived. But we should expect in another generation a noticeable increase in homosexual behavior, as they would be the second generation. As that was then still in the future, I was shocked.

This was told me in the mid ’80s. By his reckoning, we should have seen a societal explosion of homosexuality starting around 2000, and subsequently. And, of course, we have seen such an explosion. His prediction came true.

I understand that the above is a theory and one, moreover, too politically toxic ever to touch. However, as someone who fully understands just how powerful oral contraceptives are, I stand ready to accept the possibility that this forever-unexplored theory has a basis in fact.

Although the quoted material discusses the Pill and homosexuality, it seems to me that the theory could apply with equal weight to gender dysphoria. In other words, it’s entirely possible that the current rise in both homosexuality and gender dysphoria may be attributable to the ever-increasing number of women for several generations who have used hormonal birth control before getting pregnant.

Unlike people with gender dysphoria, homosexuals are happy in their own skin. They know they’re male or female. The difference between them and heterosexuals is not about identity, it’s about sexual attraction. They are drawn to their own sex and not the opposite. They therefore do not demand that they be addressed as something other than what they are, they do not demand dangerous hormonal treatments, and they do not demand deforming surgery.

However, when it comes to those kids with gender dysphoria, they are not happy in their own skin. Instead, they desperately need something to harmonize the painful disconnect between the genetic body they have and the sense of self their brain produces.

Issue No. 3: Just how violent and dangerous is the current treatment for people with gender dysphoria?

The current treatment process for those suffering from gender dysphoria is incredibly violent. First, it floods a body, usually a very young body, with hormones that the biological gender is not set-up to process. Second, it requires surgical mutilation.

Girls who suffer from gender dysphoria, believing that they are in fact boys and that their bodies should correspond with a boy’s body, get testosterone treatments. Testosterone’s effects on the female body range from permanent to temporary, and from innocuous to deadly. Here’s what happens to these girls (bolding in original; bolded-italics mine):

Females transitioning to males (FTM) may experience the following permanent effects of testosterone:

Atrophy of the uterus and ovaries, resulting in sterility

Baldness; hair loss, especially at temples and crown of head

Beard and mustache growth

Deepening of the voice

Enlargement of the clitoris

Increased growth of body hair

Sterility

Temporary changes, which are reversible after HT is stopped, include the following:

Behavioral developments associated with testosterone production during male puberty:

Aggression

Increased libido

Development of acne, similar to male puberty

Increased muscle mass and strength

Increase in number of red blood cells

Redistribution of fat from breasts, hips, and thighs to abdominal area

Increased risks associated with FTM testosterone therapy include the following:

Breast cancer

Cancer of endometrium

Diabetes

High cholesterol

Hypertension

Liver disease

In addition to the effects of testosterone on a body intended to be female, these girls often have surgery (euphemistically called “gender reassignment surgery,” as if science can “reassign” a gender) to cut off what remains of their breasts and some have surgery to turn their enlarged clitoris into something more closely approximating a penis. If they later decide that they still want to carry a baby, they undergo a whole new round of powerful hormonal treatments to try to reverse their sterility and to get their reproductive organs functioning again.

Boys who suffer from gender dysphoria, believing that they are in fact girls and that their bodies should correspond with a girl’s body, get estrogen treatments. Estrogen’s effects on the male body range from permanent to temporary, and from innocuous to deadly. Here’s what happens to these boys (bolding in original; bolded-italics mine):

Males transitioning to females (MTF) experience the following effects of estrogen:

Breast development (full development takes several years)

Loss of ejaculation

Loss of erection

Shrinkage of testicles

Sterility

Temporary changes, which are reversible after HT is stopped, include the following:

Decrease in acne

Decrease in facial and body hair

Decrease in muscle mass and strength

Skin becomes softer and smoother

Slowing of balding pattern

Redistribution of fat from abdominal area to hips and buttocks

Risks associated with HT include the following:

Benign pituitary tumors

Gallbladder disease

Hypertension (high blood pressure)

Hypothyroidism

Liver disease

Migraine headache

Tendency for blood to clot, causing related conditions:

Aneurysm

Deep vein thrombosis (DVT)

Pulmonary embolism (can be fatal)

Weight gain

Worsening of depression (if present); increased sensitivity to stress

In addition to the effects of estrogen on a body intended to be male, these boys often have surgery to add breasts and to cut off their penis and testicles. Recently, a man whose gender dysphoria caused him to feminize his body adopted a baby. His doctors gave him a series of powerful hormonal treatments to stimulate milk production in his breasts so that he could nurse this adopted child. The establishment was unconcerned about the risks for both the adoptive father and the child:

The Left is praising the use of domperidone on a male-to-female transgender individual who was given the U.S.-banned drug to induce lactation and exclusively breastfeed his child.

[snip]

The “Results” of the case report read as follows: “A 30-year-old transgender woman who had been receiving feminizing hormone therapy for the past 6 years presented to our clinic with the goal of being able to breastfeed her adopted infant. After implementing a regimen of domperidone, estradiol, progesterone, and breast pumping, she was able to achieve sufficient breast milk volume to be the sole source of nourishment for her child for 6 weeks. This case illustrates that, in some circumstances, modest but functional lactation can be induced in transgender women.”

[snip]

Domperidone has been banned in the U.S. by the FDA since 2004. “The serious risks associated with domperidone include cardiac arrhythmias, cardiac arrest, and sudden death. These risks are related to the blood level of domperidone, and higher levels in the blood are associated with higher risks of these events. Concurrent use of certain commonly used drugs, such as erythromycin, could raise blood levels of domperidone and further increase the risk of serious adverse cardiac outcomes,” says FDA.gov.

Think about it: The same people who fear baby bottles with BPA lest it alter their child’s chemicals, and demand milk from cows that aren’t pumped with hormones, are kvelling about exposing a baby to a very dangerous chemical. Of course, these are the same people who also think it’s fine to stuff children with puberty blockers and sex hormones. (One of the things I love best about being a conservative is that I no longer have to struggle with the reductio ad absurdum of my positions or with painful cognitive dissonance as conflicting belief systems crash headlong into each other.)

Let me circle back to my original issue.

If you’re still with me, you need to accept as true the following principles:

Principle 1: Gender dysphoria is a condition in which a person’s brain and body have a disconnect. The body is incontestably a distinct biological gender (either male or female) but the person’s brain keeps telling the person that he or she is, in fact, the opposite gender. Were it not for the sexual component, which is the Left’s political hot button, this tragic condition would be viewed in the same light as other body dysphorias, most notably anorexia, in which we try to align the brain with the body rather than the body with the brain.

Principle 2: Gender dysphoria, unlike other types of body dysphoria, might have a hormonal component connected to changes in the mother’s body due to long-term oral contraceptive use. In other words, there may be more going on than mental illness. The person is not a hermaphrodite, because the body is genetically perfectly aligned with male or female, but hormones may have caused the brain not to recognize the body.

Principle 3: The modern approach to treating gender dysphoria is brutal and cruel. We use powerful chemicals and disfiguring surgery to force a change that the body was never intended to support. In addition to unpleasant side effects (acne for women, sexual disinterest in men), these chemicals make the users sterile and expose them to dangerous and deadly diseases that their bodies were not programmed to experience. And of course, any surgery is always a risk. After all, every year there’s some tragic story about a person dying while having wisdom teeth extracted.

If either Principle 1 or Principle 2 is correct, it’s reasonable to accept that something very real is going on with these poor people and that we should try to treat their condition. Principle 1 suggests that psychological therapy might work. Principle 2, positing that the problem is hormonal, suggests that psychological therapy won’t help. Medical intervention is therefore reasonable. Which leads us to Principle 3.

My question, which takes place at the intersection of Principles 1 and 2, on the one hand, and Principle 3, on the other hand, is this: Why has our culture opted for such an extraordinarily brutal, cruel, dangerous medical intervention?

Genetically, absent true hermaphrodism, the body is what it is: Either male or female. It’s the brain that’s in error. Doesn’t it make much more sense to give the brain hormones that naturally align with the body than to crudely and dangerously use chemicals and knives to force a body into a shape that roughly aligns with an erroneous brain? That is, in the first instance, shouldn’t we give girls with gender dysphoria estrogen and boys with gender dysphoria testosterone?

There are only two reasons I can think of to justify the current approach:

Reason 1: My suggestion for hormones that align with the body, rather than oppose it, has been tried and failed. I have not found any data to support this proposed reason. If you know of data, please tell me about it.

Reason 2: What we’re seeing with the current medical approach is the inevitable end point of the Left’s decades’ long attack on the sexual integrity of children’s bodies. To support this contention, let me quote from an article I wrote some years ago for American Thinker before all this “transgender” madness swept the West:

Those of us who came of age before the 1980s, when the Judeo-Christian, Western tradition, though battered, was still ascendant, view our sexuality as a private matter. We believe that our bodies are our own property, which means that we should not be touched or controlled sexually without our consent. A person raised with this worldview inevitably believes as well that his ability to control his body is the essence of his individuality. This physical individuality is the antithesis of slavery, which represents a person’s ultimate lack of control over his body.

Statist regimes, of course, cannot tolerate self-ownership, which is the natural enemy of government control over the individual.

[snip]

What’s interesting is that, because the Left expresses itself in terms of “freeing” people’s sexuality, many people miss the fact that it is every bit as sexually controlling in its own way as Islam is. This control comes about because the Left works assiduously to decouple sex from a person’s own sense of bodily privacy and, by extension, self-ownership. If a person has no sense of autonomy, that person is a ready-made cog for the statist machinery.

The practical problem for the Left when it tries to attack individuality as expressed through sexuality is the fact that a person’s sense of an inviolate physical self develops quite early, during childhood:

Once a child individuates, he becomes aware of being his own self. … The most basic thing one can own is one’s own self, and not letting others touch that self in ways you don’t like is an exercise in self-ownership. (Emphasis mine.)

The Left, therefore, needs to decouple self and body as early as possible in a person’s development — and it does this by bringing its own peculiar notions of sexuality into the realms of child-rearing and education.

[snip]

Freud was right when he speculated that sex, perhaps because it is the least easily satisfied human need, may also be the most powerful physical need driving human beings. Freud, however, viewed sexuality through the spectrum of a given individual’s desires. What the statists understand — and have always understood — is that our bodies are the first line in the battle between statism and individualism. If a person is allowed to develop a sense that his body is his own to control, he will never willingly yield to the demands of the state. Only by convincing its citizens that they have no personal autonomy, beginning with control over their own bodies, can a state completely subsume the individual to the bureaucracy.

If you’re curious about past examples of the Left’s efforts to decouple self and body, you can read the rest of my article here. Suffice to say that today’s obsession with torturing young bodies is entirely consistent with the premise I stated eight years ago.

Do I have a grand conclusion here? No. I have a series of issues, principles, questions, and theories. At this point, I’ve exhausted my mental resources, both factual and analytical. It’s your turn. Please chime in and flesh out my data (and definitely correct me if I’m wrong) and puncture or support my analysis. As always, I ask only that you are polite. You’re welcome to disagree with me. You’re not welcome to abuse, insult, or threaten me.

]]>14Wolf Howlinghttp://www.bookwormroom.com/?p=550332018-02-20T19:40:32Z2018-02-20T19:40:32ZRussian meddling in the election only became an issue after Trump won. Obama had pointed advice for Trump during the campaign season. (h/t Althouse) As quoted in a tweet today by President Trump, pointing out that Obama did not consider Russian “meddling” important during the campaign, nor did he take any action regarding it until […]

]]>Russian meddling in the election only became an issue after Trump won. Obama had pointed advice for Trump during the campaign season.

(h/t Althouse) As quoted in a tweet today by President Trump, pointing out that Obama did not consider Russian “meddling” important during the campaign, nor did he take any action regarding it until after the election . . . when it suddenly became the only possible explanation for Hillary’s loss.

]]>4Bookwormhttp://bookwormroom.comhttp://www.bookwormroom.com/?p=550282018-02-20T02:14:02Z2018-02-20T02:14:01ZIt’s all here: Making Proggies admit they want to repeal the Second Amendment, revealing their simplistic thinking, and questioning transgender treatment. Facing the silly Proggies on Facebook. I always avoid my real-me Facebook page in the days after a much-publicized shooting (the media is drawn to shootings involving white kids in the suburbs as opposed […]

]]>It’s all here: Making Proggies admit they want to repeal the Second Amendment, revealing their simplistic thinking, and questioning transgender treatment.

Facing the silly Proggies on Facebook. I always avoid my real-me Facebook page in the days after a much-publicized shooting (the media is drawn to shootings involving white kids in the suburbs as opposed to black kids in the ghettos), because I simply can’t stand the hate, ignorance, and hysteria. Occasionally, though, I try to introduce a little rationality into their discussions.

For example, when my Proggie friends simultaneously demand gun control while pointing to a story about how some enterprising reporter bought a gun illegally, I ask them if they have a better idea than gun control. It’s at that point that they say the Second Amendment isn’t an individual right, something I shut down by pointing to the Heller decision. That usually ends with nasty remarks about Justice Scalia.

A lot of my gun-control Proggies post memes about the wonders of restricted gun ownership in other countries, with those posts always ending with some line about gun ownership being a privilege, not a right. If I still feel like engaging, I’ll remind them that, in the U.S., the Second Amendment means that gun ownership is a right, not a privilege. They hate that point.

And so, inevitably, we get to where my Proggie friends really want to go: Full repeal of the Second Amendment, followed by confiscating all guns in private hands.

If I still have patience, and depending on how friendly I’m feeling, once they honestly admit their goal, I’ll point out a few things: (a) Considering how they hate Trump, do they really want Trump to have all the guns? (b) Considering how they think police are racist killers, do they really want police to have all the guns? (c) And if they’re really hardcore Lefties, as opposed to useful idiot Proggies, considering how they think soldiers are baby killers, do they really want soldiers to have all the guns?

To one man, a Jewish man, I said that, since he was obviously not evil, I was surprised that he wanted to reduce Jews to the same position they were in when they faced genocidal Nazis, all armed with guns, between 1933-1945. He responded by snarking at me that he thanked God he wasn’t a Canadian blindly loyal to the Second Amendment. I told him that I thanked God too that he was a Canadian and wouldn’t be voting in any American elections. Canadians, I said, are to sheep-like, remaining convinced, all evidence to the contrary, that government is always good and will always protect them.

I don’t persuade anybody, but I do hope I cause people to think, at least a little bit. Thinking, as opposed to mindlessly repeating, can be the first stop on the road to abandoning bad or stupid ideas. At the very least, I want Proggies to be honest about the fact that they don’t believe in gun control and don’t really want it. They want to do away with guns entirely by repealing the Second Amendment without doing the hard work of actually repealing it. As Charles C.W. Cooke essentially said, bring it on.

A further thought about super valuable children.My post yesterday posited that we live in a unique historical time that sees middle-class white children as more than usually precious to their parents. No matter how loving parents were in the past, that was always tempered by a fatalism that said that some children will die (not may die) before their parents. It’s no coincidence that, for hundreds of years, American children said as their bedtime prayer, “Now I lay me down to sleep; I pray the Lord my soul to keep; and if I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” That is not an optimist’s prayer.

My brother-in-law pointed out, though, that the killers may not be thinking about hurting the parents. They just want to hurt the other children. There’s a sort of fierce emotional socialism behind that thinking that also relates to hyper-precious American children.

These maladjusted killers, who either come from unloving homes or are too emotionally damaged to feel loved, want their peers to suffer as they do. “I’m not loved and I’m not going to let you be loved.” It is, as Churchill said of socialism, the equal sharing of misery. In past times, when there was more emotional distance between parents and children (even loving parents and loved children), the chasm between damaged children and their peers might not have been so large and obvious to those damaged children.

Sometimes posters sum it all up; and sometimes they’re just stupid. Here is a pro-Second Amendment poster that sums it all up:

And sometimes posters are really dumb, insofar as they fail to distinguish between categories except in the basest, most racist way:

We can of course divide things by race (or, in the case of Muslims, by faux-racial label because Proggies are too simplistic to understand the difference between ideology and race) or, if we’re not a useful idiot Proggie, we can dig a little deeper.

Was the Muslim mass murderer someone who killed his entire family when his wife demanded a divorce or did he shoot up a military base or gay dance club while screaming “Allahu Akbar”? And if the latter, was he raised in a country that actively supports radical Islam or was he tied to foreign radical Islamists? If he was an Allahu Akbar murderer drawing ideological support from a foreign country, by all means let’s sever access as much as possible between that country and ours. So yes, TRAVEL BANS to keep more radical Islamists from pouring into our country.

Was the Hispanic murderer in this country legally or illegally? If the latter, the mass murder would never have happened but for America’s failure to enforce its immigration laws. Some of that failure comes about because, for eight years, we had an administration that refused to abide by its own laws. However, part of that failure is because we have a difficult border to manage. More than a decade ago, both parties in Congress agreed that we could manage that border — and perhaps prevent unnecessary American deaths by keeping out people who would never have been allowed in legally — by building a wall. So yes, BUILD A WALL to stop illegal murders (most of whom are Hispanic and not Dutch).

Did the Black murderer come from a Democrat-run ghetto that encourages disrespect for life by actively promoting abortions in black communities? Did the Black murderer come from a Democrat-run ghetto that denies law-abiding citizens the right to armed self-defense, making them sitting ducks for predators who don’t care about gun laws? Did the Black murderer come from a Democrat-run ghetto that marginalizes fathers by making welfare a better deal for women than entering into a stable committed relationship with her children’s father? Did the Black murderer come from a Democrat-run ghetto that dismisses the virtues of education, work, marriage, and children (in that order), because telling blacks about these things is racist and a form of cultural colonialism?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, each of which sees Democrats foreclosing policies that would help make Black communities safer, while then yes, MORE COPS AND PRISONS is the only remaining alternative. That is, if you aggressively deny people the opportunity to be their best selves, you are going to have to police and imprison their worst selves.

So that’s a really, really stupid poster based upon the racist and uninformed assumptions that underlie it.

Why are transgenders accommodated instead of treated? Those whom we call “transgenders” are people who have a form of body dysmorphia that sees their brains believing that the attached body is the wrong sex. Thus, a boy will feel that his body ought to be a girl body and a girl will feel that her body ought to be a boy body. It seems to me that the most simple way to treat this dysmorphia in the first instance is to give the boy male hormones and the girl female hormones. Theoretically, the correct hormones should feminize the girl’s brain to accept her girl’s body and masculinize the boy’s brain to accept his boy’s body.

Except that’s not what our medical establishment does or our cultural establishment demands. Instead, in the first instance, we give the boy hormones for women that atrophy his male sex organizes, make him sterile, make him grow breasts, and put him at risk of cancer. To top it off, we cut off his penis and testicles and give him breast implants, the latter of which women often complain create their own serious problems.

Likewise, in the first instance, we give the girls hormones for men that render her permanently sterile and that increase her risk of cancer. To top it off, we cut off her breasts and surgically affix some weird faux-penis to her body.

Unless someone can tell me that giving body dysmorphics increased hormones tied to their actual biological gender has been tried and invariably failed, I am at a loss to understand why we don’t approach this type of dysmorphia by using hormonal realignment instead of dangerous, destructive gender reassignment.

]]>13Wolf Howlinghttp://www.bookwormroom.com/?p=550162018-02-19T13:09:14Z2018-02-19T12:05:12ZProgressives ignore emerging facts to keep the canard alive that Trump was not legitimately elected. To delegitimize the election of Donald Trump, one of the canards that our neo-Marxist left maintains is the distinct possibility that Russian meddling may have swung the 2016 election. If all things were equal, that would be impossible to assess. […]

]]>Progressives ignore emerging facts to keep the canard alive that Trump was not legitimately elected.

To delegitimize the election of Donald Trump, one of the canards that our neo-Marxist left maintains is the distinct possibility that Russian meddling may have swung the 2016 election. If all things were equal, that would be impossible to assess. Fortunately, it is finally becoming obvious that all things are not equal and the possibility that Russian meddling swung the election is virtually nil.

One, the Russian efforts were miniscule in the larger scheme of the primary and general election season. The Russians spent, over a three year period, at a level that did not even rise in toto to 1% of the spending by the candidates and their PACs in a far more compact time period.

Two, as Powerline and Althouse point out – both with comic examples (I particularly liked Bernie Sanders as a gay icon) – the Russian political advertisements were ridiculously ham handed. The picture at the top of this post is one such.

Three, Rob Goldman, VP of Advertising for Facebook, has weighed in on this, pointing out that the majority of Russian spending on ads came after the election. Moreover, Goldman stated, “I have seen all of the Russian ads and I can say very definitively that swaying the election was *NOT* the main goal.”

Lastly, even the NYT has recognized the obvious likelihood that Russian meddling did not swing the election. In a recent article, “Russian Meddling Was a Drop in an Ocean of American-made Discord” two NY Times columnists, Amanda Taub and Max Fisher, while polishing their reporting with proggie spin, still conclude that ““the false information and political advertisements that the Russians are accused of spreading could ring true only to those already predisposed to suspect the worst.”

None of the above will stop the progs from closing their eyes to the facts and, while speaking in generalities, claim otherwise. Note that the leading opinion piece at where else but CNN, in the aftermath of the Mueller indictment, was a generalized assertion yhat Russia’s “multimillion dollar” effort of “surreptitious and illegal support handed Trump the presidency.” And on a related note, at least one Democratic Senator, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, has called on Mueller to remain silent — and thus do no further harm to the neo-Marxist narrative — until after the 2018 midterm elections. Shameless bastard.

It is impossible to have a rational discussion with such people. The Russians may have planted a seed of discord in the 2016 elections, but it is our neo-Marxist proggies who have watered that tree, fed it Miracle-Gro and grade-A horse manure, then dressed it in the secular equivalent of tinsel and Christmas lights. They aren’t interested in the truth of Russian meddling, only in using the DNC bought and paid for allegations relating thereto as a corrupt means to retake power.

If it was the GOAL of Russia to create discord, disruption and chaos within the U.S. then, with all of the Committee Hearings, Investigations and Party hatred, they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They are laughing their asses off in Moscow. Get smart America!

I think, in light of the Russian ad at the top of this page, the only appropriate response to the Trump tweet is “Amen.”

]]>14Bookwormhttp://bookwormroom.comhttp://www.bookwormroom.com/?p=550112018-02-18T22:13:40Z2018-02-18T22:13:36ZToday’s middle-class parents have a unique cohort of obsessively loved children. No wonder they’re attractive targets to young men intent on inflicting pain. In America, we are experiencing something unique: For the first time in history, the clear majority of children die after their parents, not before. Before the modern era, half of all children […]

]]>Today’s middle-class parents have a unique cohort of obsessively loved children. No wonder they’re attractive targets to young men intent on inflicting pain.

In America, we are experiencing something unique: For the first time in history, the clear majority of children die after their parents, not before. Before the modern era, half of all children died before they turned 5. That’s why Jane Austen’s parents, who could afford to do so, farmed all their children out to a wet-nurse until the children were three. Not only did this process get the parents past the midnight feedings and dirty diapers in an age before indoor plumbing, it also prevented the parents from bonding with children who were likely to die.

Even if children survived to five, life for everyone in the pre-modern era was so Hobbesian that there was still no guarantee that parents would predecease their children. A young woman’s mother might have survived childbirth, but there was no saying that the young woman would. People died young constantly, from viruses, infectious diseases, infections, food poisoning, internal maladies, and accidents. Death was always “Just around the corner.”

Nor is this what I’ve described long-dead history. I’m only middle-aged, but my parents still came from the generation in which you stayed home if you had a cold, because a cold was never just a cold. It was a doorway to pneumonia, pleurisy, and all sorts of other nasty diseases. My father had scarlet fever and measles, and my mother had diphtheria and tuberculosis. A family friend dragged his legs behind him from polio.

Daddy was born within just three decades of the “Golden Age of Germ Theory.” He and Mom were the first generation of children that routinely got pasteurized milk (although given the Weimar-era Berlin slum into which my Dad was born, while he may technically have been of that generation, he probably wasn’t one pasteurization’s beneficiaries). My parents were children when Fleming made his accidental breakthrough with penicillin. They were adults before antibiotics became a part of every doctor’s arsenal.

If antibiotics had existed during WWI, Rupert Brooke might have lived long enough to walk away from his youthful Victorian romance with chivalric war and have become a more jaded poet, a la Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon. As it was, he died early in the war, not from a bullet, but from an infected mosquito bite he got during the Gallipoli campaign. Something we would treat with a smear of Neosporin and a clean Band-Aid killed him.

One of my friends, a man in his early 60s, boasts of being one of the first people in America to survive a ruptured appendix. It’s true that operations had become common in the first half of the 20th century, before he was born, thanks both to the Golden Age of Germ Theory and the development of anesthetics. However, without antibiotics, once someone’s appendix ruptured, spreading infection throughout the abdominal area, no surgeon could stop death. Only antibiotic’s advent changed that, allowing my friend to live.

It wasn’t until 1955, just six years before I was born, that the First World wiped out polio. Before Jonas Salk’s vaccine, polio was a scourge that routinely savaged children. As I noted above, I still knew one of the survivors. Because my children have not been to Africa, they’ve never seen someone showing polio’s effects.

It’s therefore only since 1955 that the norm in America is for children to survive their parents. We bury them; they don’t bury us.

This new reality didn’t really sink in when the Baby Boomers were children. Their parents still believed, as uncounted generations had before them, that it’s a dangerous world and children die. That’s why children rode in the front seats of cars without reinforced sidings, airbags, and crumple zones; why children’s playgrounds always had rickety structures atop hard concrete; why parents let their children play outside all day and into the night during the summer; why boys got air rifles and pellet guns; and all the other dangerous things that we now send around to each other in “Can you believe?” emails or Facebook posts. These parents loved their children and tried to take reasonable precautions, but they knew that, no matter what, death was still just around the corner.

Indeed, thinking about it, the fact that our “children don’t die” mentality started with people started coming of age in the mid-1960s is probably one of the reasons anti-war protests didn’t begin until the mid-1960s. Before then, we trusted our governments more, so if the government declared war, Americans answered — after all, people die. More people die faster in war but still . . . people die.

This mindset changed with the Baby Boomers — and by Baby Boomers I mean specifically a cohort of young people, almost entirely white and middle- to upper-middle class. They were the first generation in the world history that didn’t die in droves when under five, and in significant numbers after they reached five. Even the casual parenting they received, which horrifies us now, didn’t offset the wonders of vaccination, surgery, germ theory — and battlefield medical advances. We can’t forget those.

Even in the bloody Vietnam war, which we fought for a decade, we lost fewer than 60,000 men. I don’t mean to minimize the individual tragedy that each death represented. I just think it’s worth comparing Vietnam to past American wars. In just two years in Korea, we lost almost 36,500 men. In the four years of WWII, we lost over 400,000 men. In the one year we fought WWI, over 116,500 men died. And of course, in the four years of the Civil War, around 750,000 men, more than half of whom fought to end slavery, died on American soil. Many died from bullets and shock from amputation. Most, though, died from bacteria. They died from infected wounds, they died from dysentery, and they died from the diseases malnourished men share in close quarters.

All this kind of death was alien to Baby Boomers. Between vaccinations, antibiotics, surgical advances, better battlefield and post-battlefield medicine, healthier diets, etc., Baby Boomers lived. No wonder the thought of battlefield death horrified them more than it did past generations. So, with a little push from communist disinformation, they were ready to take to the streets to protest war.

And when these Baby Boomers had children, they expected their children to live. It was Baby Boomers who brought us car safety seats, bicycle helmets, electrical outlet protectors, disinfecting hand-wipes, rubberized playground surfaces, the end of children playing on the streets on long summer evenings, and all the other things that protect most (not all, but most) American children today. Our children don’t die.

Every American middle-class child today is a wanted child. And we desperately try to keep those wanted children alive.

“Wanted child,” of course, is a loaded phrase, because it’s a pro-abortion phrase. “Make every child a wanted child.” Abortion may dehumanize the fetus but combine it with the fact those middle-class children who are not aborted are wanted, and you end up with a generation of children that occupy an emotionally-central pride of place. In the pre-modern era, the last child who was the beneficiary of as much obsessive love was probably Henry VIII’s only son, Edward VI. Poor Edward was a dynastic necessity and could not be allowed to die. (As it was, the poor thing survived Henry by only six years, dying horrifically from tuberculosis that led to sepsis in his lungs. Our children don’t die that way.)

Of course, this wanted child ethos doesn’t extend far beyond those middle-, and upper-class American children. Planned Parenthood, entirely in keeping with Margaret Sanger’s open mission to create a eugenically-pure America, plants itself disproportionately in minority ghettos. These are apparently the kids that Progressive middle-class Americans don’t think should be wanted. Journalist Becky Griffin explained it this way:

Woman puts baby up for adoption, he grows up to be a violent young man who will spend the rest of his life in prison for a mass murder. Tell me more about how abortions are wrong. #Florida#ParklandSchoolShooting

What Griffin missed, of course, is that kids who are aborted also don’t write symphonies; they don’t invent surgeries or vaccinations that save uncounted lives; they don’t become renowned brain surgeons; and they don’t become the first black president of the United States.

It’s this unique American combination — obsessively loved children side-by-side with a cavalier denigration for the “wrong” types of “unwanted” lives — that may contribute both to school shootings and to the unseemly, anti-Constitutional hysteria after school shootings.

School shooters know that those children who attend the middle-class schools where shootings happen are wanted children. Moreover, they also know, without in any way understanding how unique our modern era is, that these children are uniquely precious because, unlike all other children in all other places at all other times, they are not supposed to die. If you are angry and hate-filled, and you want to drag people into your own Hell, the best way to do that is to take away the thing they value most — those wanted children who aren’t supposed to die.

No wonder, then, that despicable school shootings happen, and no wonder, then, that a large section of the American population goes crazy afterwards. Those crazy, fatherless boys on psychotropic drugs, living in a culture that simultaneously advocates for the killing of “unwanted” babies and adulates “wanted” ones, know precisely the most effective way to spread their pain. No wonder that those who have invested everything in their children break down. Seeing their pain is horrible, feeling it unimaginable, and hoping to avoid it with one’s own children inevitable.

But the ugly side of this hysterical outpouring of grief from America’s wealthy Blue enclaves is the unspoken racism behind it all. As I mentioned above, these same fanatically loving parents fund (and demand that taxpayers fund) an organization that targets lower class and minority children. Their Progressive spokespeople, educated in their Progressive colleges, no longer bother even to pretend that all children are equal. Griffin makes it plain that the potentially bad ones should be killed asap.

Most tellingly, even though every single month in Democrat slums across America sees children killed in numbers routinely equal to a single middle-class school shooting, the same Progressives aren’t hysterical. Even if the parents in those communities want their children, they shouldn’t. The only solution the Left has to offer is gun control, which does nothing to decrease the weapons in criminals’ hands, and abortion.

I suspect that, without ever consciously thinking about it, middle class Proggies know that death is more common in these poor, Democrat-run communities. If death is more common, these poor parents should be inured to it, just as generations of people have always kept a little emotional distance between themselves and their fragile children.

After all, in places such as Obama’s Chicago, poverty and ignorance mean that the old ills still stalk children: diseases, infections, viruses, grotesque accidents, and, always, those swift-flying bullets in their tightly gun-controlled communities.

The old ills aren’t the only ills. Because Democrat culture demonizes men and Democrat policies uncut fatherhood, there are too many children in these poor communities with single mothers who bring into their homes feral boyfriends who, exactly like the new lion who takes over the old lion’s pride, kill the old lion’s offspring. The two most dangerous places for a minority child are in its mother’s womb or under her boyfriend’s care.

No wonder, despite the plethora of inner-city gang shootings that see children killed in the crossfire, that there are no mass shootings in non-middle-class schools. Everyone absorbs the dominant culture and that culture tells them that these are not the wanted children. What happens in the ghetto stays in the ghetto. National cameras won’t roll, tweets won’t fly, politicians won’t dart in front of microphones, and nothing will change.

As with so many things, today’s school shootings are a cultural problem. Attacking the Second Amendment — while it will diminish individual liberty and make us vulnerable to history’s greatest killer, government — will do nothing to save our children. Only valuing all children, not just the “wanted” ones will help change things — and even then, imperfectly at best. Life is sad and tragic and dangerous, and even as we tamp down death in one guise it appears in another.

]]>18Bookwormhttp://bookwormroom.comhttp://www.bookwormroom.com/?p=550042018-02-18T00:43:19Z2018-02-18T00:42:49ZCharlie Kirk, who brings patriotism, free market ideology, and respect for individual liberty to American colleges, is a must-see guest on the Rubin Report. Not quite two years ago, I had the tremendous privilege to meet Charlie Kirk when he came to speak to a speakers group in Marin. I wrote about him then, summarizing […]

]]>Charlie Kirk, who brings patriotism, free market ideology, and respect for individual liberty to American colleges, is a must-see guest on the Rubin Report.

Not quite two years ago, I had the tremendous privilege to meet Charlie Kirk when he came to speak to a speakers group in Marin. I wrote about him then, summarizing as best as I could the remarkable cascade of brilliant insights this 22-year-old was reeling off.

At the time, I opened my post by writing “Oh. My. God. Charlie is a human dynamo: incredible intelligence and moral decency wrapped up in pure energy and passion, presented through the medium of a riveting presence.” I concluded that same post by saying “If you have the chance to attend a Charlie Kirk speech — take it. He is a genuine phenomenon.”

Twenty-two is pretty young and a lot can happen to a 22-year-old in a short time. If you’re Charlie Kirk, you get better. That is, you raise a high bar and then easily vault over it to set new standards for intellectual honesty, intelligent analysis, and fluent discourse. Don’t believe me? Watch him speaking last month to Dave Rubin, of the Rubin Report:

It’s a long video (Rubin works in long form, so he can develop his guests’ ideas), and it’s worth watching in its entirety. Not only do Charlie and Dave expound on core American ideas and genuine intellectual diversity, they also discuss a quiet revolution taking place on America’s college campuses.

I never did get around to telling you about Evan Sayet’s delightful talk to the same speaker’s group this past Wednesday. (And no, this is not the non sequitur it seems to be.) I meant to write about his talk, but the shooting in Florida came up and I got so focused on thinking and writing about it, that I sort of abandoned my follow-up on Evan’s talk. I’ll try to pick it up in a later post, because he had a lot to say about the liberal mindset, all of it insightful and interesting.

The reason I mention Evan here, though, is because he said something that Charlie echoes: namely, that outside of the noisy cohort of true believer Leftist students on campus, the ones who show up to shout down speakers, and who run on forever about safe spaces, triggers, microaggressions, etc., other college students are heading in the other direction. They know they’re being lied to — especially as they see that Trump hasn’t sent gays to concentration camps, arrested journalists, raped women (a Saddam Hussein & Sons specialty act) or done any of the other heinous things alleged against him.

These young people also see that the economy is going up, not down, and that America’s enemies are backing off not stepping up. Raised in houses with “woke” working mothers and work, emasculated fathers, they want two parent homes, with a stay-at-home Mom and a Dad supporting the family.

There is hope, Evan said, and Charlie, who’s in the college trenches, agrees. Interestingly, the media (that would be the same media Trump has not arrested) is refusing to report on this revolution, but it’s real.

Tonight, if you were planning on watching some TV, but didn’t have anything particular in mind, try watching the above video. I think you’ll enjoy it. I’m going to see if I can get the Little Bookworms to watch it. It might inoculate them a bit against the campus radicals.

If you like what Charlie has to say, please think about donating to his organization, Turning Point, USA. As I’ve written time and time again, America’s campuses are the locus of the spreading socialist infection in America. Those graduates fill Silicon Valley, Hollywood executive offices, Madison Avenue, every news outlet, and all of America’s educational institutions. The rot started with them and needs to end with them.

]]>2Wolf Howlinghttp://www.bookwormroom.com/?p=549852018-02-19T10:05:27Z2018-02-17T13:11:26ZThe Mueller indictments show that no American conspired with the Russians — and that the Russians successfully acted to “sow discord” in the U.S. political system. After suffering through a year of hysteria and the disruption of our national politics by our neo-Marxist progs trying to undo the election, Americans deserve the entire truth about what […]

]]>The Mueller indictments show that no American conspired with the Russians — and that the Russians successfully acted to “sow discord” in the U.S. political system.

After suffering through a year of hysteria and the disruption of our national politics by our neo-Marxist progs trying to undo the election, Americans deserve the entire truth about what happened. We received some of it yesterday when the Special Counsel delivered his first series of indictments against thirteen Russian nationals, working through two Russian front corporations, for crimes relating to interference with the 2016 election.

The indictments go a long way, though not all the way, to clearing the Trump campaign of conspiring with the Russians. They put the Russian efforts into context — their operation was small. The facts definitively establish that Russian support of Trump was a by-product, not an end goal of the operation. Equally important, Rod Rosenstein explicitly stated that no American citizen, let alone anyone in the Trump campaign, was knowingly complicit in the actions described in the indictment.

One of the striking things to come out of the indictment was how small the Russian operation was. In terms of money and manpower, it was an operation involving 13 named defendants and several hundred employees working through two Russian corporate entities, all on a combined budget of no more than $2 million a month from 2014 through the end of 2016 (Indictment, ¶¶ 10-11). To put that into perspective, during 2016 campaign, candidates on both sides, along with their supporters and PACs, spent hundreds of millions during the primaries; then they spent $2.65 billion during the four+ month general election season. It does not seem possible that such limited scale Russian activities would have made the slightest difference to the outcome of the 2016 election. And indeed, Rod Rosenstein, in announcing the indictments, explicitly stated that there is nothing in the indictment to suggest that the activities of the Russians had any impact on the outcome of the 2016 elections.

[UPDATE: The progs are trying to paint this limited Russian “meddling” as the single greatest threat to the continuation of our Republic since 1776. Ann Althouse responds with humor and disdain to this argument. This charge also points out another thing that the progs are conflating. Trump has certainly taken to denying that he or his campaign played any role in coordinating with the Russians. However, contrary to proggie suggestions, this is not the same as claiming that the specific intelligence that we have about Russian attempts to influence our election are false.]

(Indictment, ¶¶ 43-57) Initially, the Russians targeted expected Republican front runners Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, while on the other side of the aisle, they supported Bernie Sanders against the person everyone expected to be the next President — expected it right up until about 11 p.m. on Nov. 8, 2016 — Hillary Clinton. Once Trump won the primary, the Russians began to support Trump and Jill Stein while continuing to disparage Clinton. Once Trump, against all expectations, won the election, the same Russians turned on Trump and organized anti-Trump rallies. The Russians also exploited racial divisions.

(Indictment, ¶ 6) As the indictment explicitly states and the facts support, the overarching “strategic goal” of the Russian operation was to “sow discord” in the U.S. political system throughout the election season and afterwards as well. That being the case, the support of any one candidate or the disparagement of any other candidate was situational. This fact, taken straight from the indictment, eviscerates the claim — central to the Trump Russia narrative and announced by DNI Clapper in January, 2017 — that the overarching goal of Russia’s operation was to help Trump get elected.

[Update: Rob Goldman, VP of Advertising for Facebook, weighed in today, pointing out that the majority of Russia’s ad buys on social media occurred after the election. He wrote “I have seen all of the Russian ads and I can say very definitively that swaying the election was *NOT* the main goal.”]

Despite all of the above contained in the indictment, our neo-Marxist media seems determined to ignore all contrary facts.

There is not a single MSM publication, at least none showing up on Memorandum, that seems to be playing this with any sort of intellectual honesty. Disgusting bastards all of them.

On a final note, this indictment seemed to cover most, if not all of the activities that the Russians took on social media, as well as a few additional organizing activities. Someone with knowledge allegedly leaked to Bloomberg News, after the indictment, that the investigation was continuing and that Mueller was still investigating Trump Russia collusion. But it certainly seems that all that is left is the Wikileaks leak — something that no one has alleged that the Trump administration had any criminal role in — and Steele’s other vague allegations of Trump-Russia quid pro quo.

On the flip side, quite importantly, the indictment does not begin to touch on whether the Steele allegations form the basis the biggest political scandal in our American history, a knowing fiction orchestrated by the DNC to swing, then overturn, the 2016 election. That is something that seems far more likely than not if the Steele allegations are proven false. We damn well need the answers to that as well and the clock is ticking. Russian meddling in the 2016 election may have made no difference, but the neo-Marxist prog left are determined that allegations of Trump collusion will be central to the 2018 midterms. If we do not get answers before then, rest assured that we likely never will.

[Bookworm here: Usually, Wolf Howling is more optimistic than I. On the subject of the Democrat role in this disgraceful scandal, I’m slightly more optimistic than he is, because I have great hopes for the Inspector General Horowitz’s upcoming report. I also hope I’m not disappointed.]

]]>20Bookwormhttp://bookwormroom.comhttp://www.bookwormroom.com/?p=549822018-02-16T23:35:46Z2018-02-16T23:35:24ZMidge went to the Women’s March last month in San Francisco and asked a few people to explain why they were protesting. The results are illuminating. The best thing about the video was that she didn’t interview anyone I know — because after all, living as I do near San Francisco, many of my friends […]

]]>Midge went to the Women’s March last month in San Francisco and asked a few people to explain why they were protesting. The results are illuminating.

The best thing about the video was that she didn’t interview anyone I know — because after all, living as I do near San Francisco, many of my friends attended the Women’s March. As long as I don’t see videos of them being openly stupid, ill-informed, and hate-filled, I can continue appreciating them for the virtues they show in our day-to-day life of work and parenting.

]]>4Wolf Howlinghttp://www.bookwormroom.com/?p=549732018-02-16T19:47:30Z2018-02-16T19:44:36ZRecent commentary from Adam Schiff, Andrew McCarthy, Lee Smith and others illuminates important issues swirling around the Trump-Russia collusion narrative. Rep. Adam Schiff, one of the four Congressional Democrats with the clearance to actually put eyes on all of the top secret documents made available to date by the FBI and others as part of the […]

Rep. Adam Schiff, one of the four Congressional Democrats with the clearance to actually put eyes on all of the top secret documents made available to date by the FBI and others as part of the House Intelligence Committee investigation, made a jaw dropping admission in so many words while answering media questions. He admits he has seen no evidence to date to establish any sort of criminal conspiracy between Trump and Russia. In other words, more than a year into this politically-driven investigation, there is no Trump-Russia Collusion.

So, if there is no evidence to support any of the allegations, when are we going to start investigating to determine whether this was a criminal enterprise involving Christopher Steele, CIA Director John Brennan, Fusion GPS, the DNC and others to throw the election to Clinton, destroy Trump’s presidency, and protect corrupt government officials?

Lee Smith, writing at The Federalist, looks in detail at how senior figures in the media, namely New Yorker editor David Remnick, Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, former New Republic editor Franklin Foer, and Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, coordinated with Fusion GPS and the DNC to create an echo chamber, driving the Trump Russia collusion narrative. It is a sordid story that needs to come out as well.

On a related note is a Ted Talk given by Sheryl Attkinson, where she not only puts in perspective “fake news,” but identifies the source of the fake news controversy, much of which involves the Trump-Russia narrative, with a starring role from a Google owner. The progressive left has used the mantra of “fake news” to justify their creep into censoring conservative voices. I’ve long believed that social media sites and the major search engines are so powerful that they need either to be subject to anti-trust litigation and / or they need to be required to adhere to the First Amendment as if they were a public institution.

At National Review, former DOJ attorney Andrew McCarthy looks at the Rice CYA memo and connects the dots. It seems there really was a conspiracy, but Trump had nothing to do with it. Instead, it involved Obama, Comey, Sally Yates and others, acting at a minimum to hide the scope and nature of the Trump-Russia investigation — including that it was all based on research paid for by the DNC — from Trump himself. It is outrageous if McCarthy is correct, and his detailed explanation does seem reasonable. It also makes me wonder if the appointment of a special prosecutor charged with conducting the entire counter-intelligence investigation wasn’t baked into the cake at this meeting? We need to know everything there is to know about that meeting.

One of the more obscene events in the investigation surrounding the collusion narrative was the political assassination of Michael Flynn. Flynn subsequently was strong-armed by Mueller into pleading guilty for perjuring himself during an FBI interview Sentencing was supposed to take place just a few days ago but was postponed until May. Former DOJ attorney Sidney Powell throws light onto what is probably going on — that the prosecution did not provide critically important exculpatory evidence that the FBI agents who interviewed him thought that he had not lied — to Flynn before battering into a guilty plea. Everything about the Trump-Russia collusion narrative and the Mueller investigation stinks to high heaven.

I have been pointing out for two years now that the single most basic claim regarding the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, that the Russians “hacked” the DNC server, remains unproven. The only source for this claim comes from another DNC paid organization, one hired at the same time as Fusion GPS, Crowdstrike. The FBI has turned our nation upside down with the Trump-Russia collusion narrative and their incessant media leaks, and yet almost two years after the hack, has not conducted their own independent inspection and analysis of the server. This is beyond inexplicable. Given both the collapse of the Trump-Russia Collusion narrative and the fact that, almost two years after the murder of Seth Rich, the man Julian Assange intimated was the source of the leaks, the server has not been examined to prove or disprove that claim, the server needs to be taken into evidence.